The elderly Jews are gone now, the ones who carried their Yiddish cadences and stories of the rag trade and the Old Country with them down to the tip of Miami Beach. Throughout the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s and even into the ‘80s, they sat in rickety, rainbow-striped folding chairs on the warm sand, sweet Atlantic breezes tousling their white hair. Or they sat on the front porches of the many small Art Deco-style hotels and apartment buildings they called home in their autumn years, whiling away the hours in their Southern shtetl.

One red wine was compared to a really great passionate kiss. Another was praised as earthy, like wet leaves, like the earth itself.

Participants in the Israeli Wine Lovers Club are encouraged to share their reactions to the wines they taste, to speak about aromas, flavors, oakiness, acidity, balance and, mostly, how all of the above strikes their palettes.

Kosher wine in America is an ever-changing, ever-growing multi-million-dollar industry. In order to try to get a grasp on some of the trends in the dynamic kosher wine market The Jewish Week recently talked to Gary Wartels, the owner of Skyview Wines and Spirits in Riverdale, one of the largest kosher retailers in the New York area.

Jewish Week: Looking back over the past few years what do you see as the recent major trends in kosher wine?

Ma nishtana halaylah hazeh mekol halailot? — Why is this night different from all other nights?” This question, asked at virtually every Passover seder the world over, has four traditional answers. However, one could suggest a fifth answer: “On all other nights we are not required to drink more than one cup of wine, but tonight we must drink four cups.”